Good News, Bad News, All Around News Worth Day

A HUGE thank you to everyone who came out to support Monkey's first feature show on Friday! The opening showcased mythical beasts discovered by Rick Kitagawa (aka Monkey) and Grant Gilliland. It was fun catching up with new and old friends alike, we even met some of our blog readers in person! If you missed the showing, “Bestiarum Vocabulum” will still be on display at Big Umbrella Studios until the end of this month.

Monkey was busy painting and preparing right up until the moment it opened. This was a good lesson as it was his first feature and would like to plan more in advance for his split collaboration with Seal for the June OZ Gallery. At the same time, Seal was preparing her work portfolio and for her upcoming show this Thursday: “Warhol Reimagined: The New Factory.”

So after a lot of internal deliberations at the Monkey + Seal cave, we realize that we bit off a bit more than we could chew with a M-W-F blog format. After a few successive weeks of missing posts here and there, we regretfully realized that we're a bit overloaded. Now that Monkey is helping run Big Umbrella Studios, Seal is working full time on her portfolio and getting into gallery shows, and we'll both be painting for our upcoming feature show at Oz Gallery in June, we realized that for the time being, we are unable to deliver the blog posts in a quality and consistent manner. We were rather disappointed with ourselves over the last couple of weeks.

Posts have gotten shorter, some without images, and this is definitely NOT what we want. We want to offer our readers constant quality posts with thought-provoking content that inspires you to reach for the stars and follow your dreams and become even more awesome than you already are. We get a pleasure of writing these posts and sharing with you our honest lives.

So after lot of careful considerations, in order to deliver consistently with high quality content and illustrations while practicing the sustainability that we often preach, we decided that it would be best for our readers and ourselves to blog our main posts only on Wednesdays. Our main posts will be our new posts about inspiration, meeting your goals, chasing your dreams, and will be accompanied by new high quality illustrations each week.

Because in the end, we want to spend the time and quality on making sure the Wednesday posts are excellent, we'll continue to have posts here and there of show information, reviews, and random goodness, but they will be unscheduled and flexible. So be sure to subscribe and/or check back so you won’t miss a beat.

We really appreciate everyone sticking with us thus far, and as our journey is far from over and is actually climbing much faster than we anticipated, we hope you'll continue on with us for years to come. We really couldn't have done it without you. Thanks so so so much for all the support and we'll see you on Wednesdays for now!

Having an Online Presence

image: (c) xkcd.com, image used without permission, but you should definitely check out the site - awesome comics!

If you want to get your work "out there" (and presumably viewed by lots and lots of interested parties), in this modern era of the internet, you have to have an online presence. If you google yourself, are you on the first page? Hopefully you are, but if you aren't, that is a goal you want to start working on.

Now you don't necessarily need to have your own website, but it's definitely ideal. However, if you don't have a handy-dandy web-editing program like Dreamweaver, you start talking html, php, xtml, etc., etc. and that gets costly either in education, time spent learning it, or paying someone to create your site.

Assuming you don't have the resources (yet) to build your own site, there are a lot of cool portfolio sites out there, but they don't offer a lot of customization. There's Coroflot, Carbonmade, deviantART, Behance, and many more, so definitely check them all out to see which one floats your boat (or create a portfolio on all of them - most of the big ones are totally free). You can also (less ideally) put your work up on blogger and keep it exclusively as a portfolio site.

Or, you can go to Escape from Illustration Island and check out this handy dandy tutorial to make your own portfolio site using Wordpress to make your own site. I highly recommend it, and wish that we would have read this before we built monkeyandseal.com. To give you a head's up on what we're eventually planning, we are going to eventually migrate to a wordpress-based site where our portfolios, blog, and shop are all nicely integrated into one big site. So if you can jump on the bandwagon of fancy wordpress users now, it's a great time to get started.

You also want to make a Facebook fan page for yourself. Ask your friends to like it and once you get to 100 fans you'll be able to get your own www.facebook.com/YourName url! Snazzy, plus you can use it to send our messages to people who you know are interested in what you're up to!

We also highly recommend keeping a blog. This way your audience can learn more about you, and hopefully through interaction, you can learn more about them. Blogger, tumblr (great if you like short posts or just photos), and wordpress are probably the three biggest blogging platforms that we know of, but there are a lot out there.

Really, the most important lesson to take away here is that it is all about finding your audience, and the only way to do that is to put yourself out there. In whatever form works for you, make sure that you are putting yourself and your art out there, as you are doing a disservice to everyone by not sharing your unique, personal expression with the world!

Any other good venues to explore? Please share 'em in the comments!

Illustration Friday (on a Monday)

For everyone who loves art but doesn't know about Illustration Friday, you should definitely go check it out. It's an online community that takes a no-pressure, supportive take on creating art. Every Friday, the organizers send out an email (or publish on the site) a new, single-word topic that artists all over the world can illustrate. They have one week, and can (at no cost or obligation) submit their link to a blog or something that hosts their image. Artists submit thumbnails, and you can browse galleries to see all the myriad of interpretations people can have for themes like "Wrapped," "Contagious," and "Unfold."

Monkey does his best to participate weekly (although often he ends up being a week late), but you can find his entries at his personal blog Politics Art Culture. Monkey is currently working to catch up on last week's topic (Caution) as well as the current topic (Magnify), but his response to "Wrapped" is up.

Anyhoo, you should definitely check out Illustration Friday as there is a whole global community of awesome artists (from students to hobbyists to professionals) out there!